When Francisco de Montejo and his people arrived at Chichen Itza, the city had been abandoned for at least 200 years. They were the first Europeans to reach what had once been the most important city in Mesoamerica and their jaws dropped: even Diego de Landa, the person in charge of one of the most savage inquisitorial processes in all of continental America, recognized the majesty of the ruins of the holy city.
How could there be cities that size in the middle of the jungle? In the early days, the Spanish conquerors thought of putting the capital right there, but its distance from the sea, on the one hand; and the lack of fresh water, on the other, declined the balance towards Mérida. However, that itself opened a lot of questions. To begin with, how could 100,000 people live with their aqueducts, their roads, their astronomical observatories, and their temples in a place like that, where (as in all of Yucatan) drinking water was scarce?
When what gives you life ends up taking it away. The explanation is simpler than it seems: thanks to a truly impressive effort to build canals and aqueducts. Precisely that very powerful water system was not only the vault key of the very solid Mayan civilization, but also its own curse.
A recent study by Auburn University (USA) has studied the decline of the ancient Mayan city of Kaminaljuyú and has discovered that it was severely affected by a plague of toxic cyanobacteria originating in Lake Amititlán, in central Guatemala and spread by the Mayan water network.
The Unseen Curse… We know this because it was not a unique or sudden process. One by one, the great Mayan cities were losing their vitality, prey to what seemed to be a curse: people were getting sick, it was shown that the inhabitants of this ancient Mayan city of Tikal brought sand from hundreds of kilometers to purify the water of its reservoirs. In other words, the Mayans created this water filtration system almost 2,000 years before similar systems were used in Europe: without much success, yes.
It is clear that it was not the only reason for the collapse. The end of the Mayan empire was the result of a concatenation of causes and problems that are difficult to summarize. However, as soon as we learn more about all that, we discover that nature, health and climate were (then as now) the triggers of a great social, economic and political change.
